I won't have (or be able to get) international patent protection as the US patents are 6-7 years old. I have trademark protection in the US (in addition to the patents) and the brand name is also the website name etc.

I'm going to switch it over in the new year and monitor it closely. I'm comfortable with the change after I saw just how closely the prices match. The discount/free shipping are literally within a dollar or two of the existing prices.
If it negatively impacts our sales I'll just fall back to the old price schedule.

Really good point. We set the price at $10 to keep it more in line with what you'd expect to see at a big box store. In order to maintain that price point we added the shipping price on top. At higher quantities the product actually subsidizes the shipping cost. We use a fulfillment center which means our costs are a bit higher to ship than if we did it ourselves. The trade off is - orders are processed timely and there's rarely (never) an error. It also allows the site to run on "auto-pilot"

We actually are the main manufacturer for this product. Anyone selling on amazon or ebay is buying from us. Two things help us not get knocked off 1) we have utility and design patents and 2) it's a bit of a niche product so there's not crazy intense demand (but it's still really profitable).

It's not a million dollar idea/product (but it's a decent idea and I think we've executed it really well). It has a good little revenue stream every month (from online sales and sales to dealers) and we get big orders from a major customer 3-4 times a year (about 20k each time - 14k of which is pure profit). The large customer (and it's a big name everyone would recognize) has been buying since 2009.

The free shipping idea is an attempt to convert more of our daily visitors to our site into customers.

I just worked the numbers... here's the results....
First three columns show the number purchased, our normal retail ($9.99) and the applicable shipping we currently charge.
The last two columns represent the new $15 and FREE shipping with a SAVE 20% when you order more than 1 pack.
Pretty surprising... the numbers are comparable.

Thanks for the feedback. I think I'm going to go ahead and switch the site over during the holidays so that free shipping rolls out for January. We'll benchmark the changes against last year's numbers.

The optimizely option mzito mentioned doesn't look like it will easily do an a/b ecommerce test. It's great for changing text and graphics, switching headlines etc. but what we're looking for is a much broader test.

I'm going to work out the numbers this weekend to accomodate free shipping and a discount for ordering >1 package. We'll also program in a call-out on the website that let's people know about the new changes. Likely employ HelloBar.

Sorry - this doesn't make sense to me. May need some help from you explaining it to me. I don't see how this works.

I only have one ecommerce site - are you saying we should duplicate the entire site (one exactly as it is now and one with higher prices but free shipping) and then split the traffic? This is a horrendous amount of work.

We've been selliing for years but recently switched to a more professional platform (shopify) about a year ago.
Our MSRP is $10 - it costs us a little over a $1 to make so there's enough meat on the bone for wholesale and distributor pricing.

Sorry and to answer your question - we DO have a large company (online) selling our product and we have smaller mom/pop stores (about 20-30) selling around the country.